4 Ways to Feed Your Kids
When our kids ask, “What’s for dinner?” it seems like a simple question with a simple answer. But deciding what to feed our families can be complex and confusing. Questions abound regarding what should be in our food and what shouldn’t, or how much or little we should eat. I have certainly had misunderstandings about food. In seeking to fight gluttony or take control of my health, I’ve tried to give myself incentives by stressing the danger of certain ingredients over other ingredients. I’ve called some foods “good” and other foods “bad.”
And when I attach moral significance to food, I’m only doing something people have done for thousands of years. But Jesus, speaking to his Jewish followers, had something to say about this: “…it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person” (Matt. 15:11). In other words—What you eat isn’t what’s wrong with you. What’s wrong with you is coming straight up from your heart.
Later, the apostles wrote things like, “Food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do” (1 Cor. 8:8) and “For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer” (1 Tim. 4:4–5).
While it’s good and right to be thoughtful about what we feed our children, it’s helpful to remember that food—in and of itself—can neither hinder nor help us in obtaining righteousness. This doesn’t mean God is ambivalent about the family table. But it does mean he cares more about how we feed our children than what we feed them. So if that’s true, then how should we feed them? Let me list four ways.
Feed Them with Joy
When we feed our kids, we’re not just filling their bellies. We want them to experience a variety of tastes and smells at the table, yes, but we also want them to have a sensory experience of the gospel. And the gospel says that because Jesus overthrew death and sin, we now have the opportunity to walk through ordinary moments of work and mess with an unearthly joy. We can cook spaghetti and patiently serve that spaghetti to little, messy people with thankfulness to God and without complaining.
A gourmet meal served with tight lips and a cold word would still leave our kids hungry.[1] Cooking, serving, and enjoying wholesome food with our family can bring us a measure of happiness and satisfaction, but true joy is something that no organic ingredient or farm-to-table meal can produce in us. It’s something rare and precious, something our children will remember long after they’ve forgotten the taste of the spaghetti.
Feed Them with Authority
We should remember our children’s frame—they naturally gravitate more to foods they can pick up, colorful foods, and certain flavor profiles.[2] But this doesn’t mean we have to let our toddlers decide the menu. Part of serving our kids well means setting up a family table that’s in harmony with God’s reality. And in that reality, our young children aren’t in charge of the universe.
So we serve them cheerfully, but we also teach them to cheerfully serve others. We accept God’s bounty with gratitude, and we also teach our children to do the same. We graciously show them that the family table doesn’t exist to give them exactly what they want, when they want it.[3]
In our house, we try to use the table as an opportunity to practice basic skills with our children: helping set the table or clean up, cheerfully eating what’s served, and listening to someone else talk. This is often an awkward (sometimes even painful!) process, but it’s also worthwhile. We seek to mirror God’s dealing with us—he lays a generous table of blessings for his children, and those blessings are best enjoyed in an environment of relational order, inside of a system of loving authority.
Feed Them with Generosity
Cooking for a family is hard, repetitive work. It can be tempting to do the bare minimum—they’re just kids, we think. They don’t care what they eat. But when we approach the task halfheartedly—content to just get by—we miss out on some of the most enjoyable aspects of feeding children. We miss out on blessing their socks off by going above and beyond the call of duty. How about asking them into the kitchen to make an extra special dessert? How about learning to make biscuits from scratch? Feeding our children is an act of generosity, and we can get even more out of it by doing it wholeheartedly, with our palms open and sleeves rolled up. This is, after all, the way God gives to us.
Feed Them with an Eye to Kingdom Work
When we invite others to our family table, we’re inviting our children to be part of front-line kingdom work. Not only are we ministering to their bodies and souls, we’re ministering to other people’s bodies and souls through the act of hospitality.
The table is an opportunity for the gospel at all times. It’s a place where family culture can be developed, Scripture can be studied and sung, and struggles can be shared. So when we invite others into this family culture, we invite them to experience the gospel. The table shows them the heavenly kingdom they’re also invited to—a joyful, bountiful kingdom where everyone pitches in on the dishes. And our children get to be part of this outreach.
How we decide what’s for dinner tonight can be driven by something much bigger than our worries about ingredients and calories. Instead, the questions can become gospel-driven: How can I display Christ tonight at my table? How can I promote true delight and enjoyment at my table? How will Jesus Christ be glorified in my neighborhood through my table?
Those are the kinds of questions worth giving our whole attention to.
[1] Proverbs 17:1
[2] Psalm 103:14
[3] Proverbs 29:17
